Ohio Conference

Earlier this year, nearly 45 members of the Akron First church participated in the “Walk to Stop Hunger.” A total of 229 walkers raised $9,263.51 to benefit the Akron Canton Regional Foodbank, which services eight counties around Akron and Canton. About 20 percent of the amount was raised by Akron church sponsors.

Most [Visitor] readers are probably familiar with the war between the Tutsis and Hutus in the early ’90s, in which more than 800,000 people were slaughtered. It is one of the greatest genocides in modern history anywhere in the world,” shares Winston Baldwin, senior pastor of the Centerville church.

While Roy Simpson was growing up, his dad, Peter, always cut his hair, except for a few years when “I wanted to do things my way,” says Roy, who used to think he was very different from his dad. That changed after working with him as a volunteer at the conference office where they shared many conversations. Those talks “made me realize that we have so much in common, especially our passion for ministry,” says Roy, assistant treasurer for Ohio Conference.

Mark Twain famously wrote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”